Today, the Gerstner era of International Business Machines is over, and the Krishna era is truly beginning, as Big Blue is spinning out the system outsourcing and hosting business that gave it an annuity-like revenue stream – and something of an even keel – in some rough IT infrastructure waters for two over decades. …
If you wanted to wrest control of datacenter compute as embodied mainly in the Xeon SP processor away from Intel, there are a number of approaches that you might take. …
It must have been something in the cosmic ether.
Apopros of nothing except the need to fill a blank page with something interesting back when we were analyzing IBM’s second quarter financials and considering the options that Big Blue has with the “Cirrus” Power10 systems it will be launching about a year from now, we did a thought experiment about what it would mean if IBM started to believe in big iron machines again. …
For the past several years here at The Next Platform, as we have been pondering what IBM might do with the future Power10 processor, we have been feinting here and there with our analytical pen, trying to suss out precisely what Big Blue might be up to, particularly with the unique memory architecture that it has been working on for more than a decade. …
There isn’t really a systems business so much as a collection of them, all unique and all facing their own particular challenges. …
As we’ve talked about in the past, the focus on data – how much is being generated, where it’s being created, the tools needed to take advantage of it, the shortage of skilled talent to manage it, and so on – is rapidly changing the way enterprises are operating both in the datacenter and in the cloud and dictating many of the product roadmaps being developed by tech vendors. …
Earlier this month, we were talking to the James Kulina, the new executive director of the OpenPower Foundation, which is the organization created by IBM and Google back in the summer of 2013 to create a community around the Power architecture. …
Java turned 25 years old in May, marking a quarter of a century in which it has consistently been one of the most widely used programming languages. …
If you want to build a successful hardware ecosystem around a chip architecture that has recently been open sourced, as the Power chip instruction set was last August, then it probably makes a lot of sense to put someone at the helm of the project who has deep and broad experience participating in the open source software ecosystem. …
When IBM announced that it was acquiring Red Hat for $34 billion eighteen months ago, one of the things we said that Big Blue needed most and would get from taking over – but not messing with – the world’s largest commercial open source software company was a coherent story that it could tell to its customers about how IBM, which more than any other company helped define data processing, was still relevant to the future. …
All Content Copyright The Next Platform